How the minority report deals with the sick, the infirm, and the infants / The National Committee to Promote the Break-up of the Poor Law.

  • National Committee to Promote the Break-up of the Poor Law.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: How the minority report deals with the sick, the infirm, and the infants / The National Committee to Promote the Break-up of the Poor Law. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    body largely made up of representatives of Boards of Guardians, and actually maintained out of the poor rates, they have become, both by statute and by Local Government Board decisions, practically public health institutions. The dozen great hospitals thus maintained for small-pox, scarlet fever, enteric fever and diphtheria, now admit all cases recommended by any medical practitioner, irrespective of the patient’s affluence. The maintenance and treatment, once made matter of charge, is now by virtue of the Public Health (London) Act, 1891, universally free. The inmates, originally exclusively paupers, are now explicitly declared to be not pauperised, the treatment, and even the maintenance, being (by the Diseases Prevention Act ol 1883) expressly stated not to be parochial relief and to involve no stigma of disqualification whatsoever. The municipal hospitals of the provincial towns, provided in the first instance usually for small-pox, have had their spheres extended to scarlet fever, enteric fever, and usually diphtheria; in addition to any stray cases of plague, cholera or typhus that may turn up. But they do not stop there. The Public Health Acts do not prescribe the kind of disease to be treated in the hospital which they authorise, and whatever may have been the primary object for which it was established, there is nothing to prevent the Local Authority from admitting any sick patients whatsoever. Hence, although it is generally assumed that these so-called “ Isolation Hospitals ” are for infectious cases only, the list of diseases dealt with is steadily growing. At Barry and Widnes there are even municipal hospitals which exclude all infectious diseases. But the greatest recent development has been in the provision for tuberculosis. The Brighton Municipal Hos- pital in 1906 actually dealt with more cases of phthisis than of any other disease, they forming a third of its whole number of patients,-and amounting to nearly two per 1,000 of the entire population of the town. The object of their admission is not so much immediate cure as treatment with a view to instruction in good hygienic habits. They are therefore admitted preferably at an early stage, before being invalided, and they are retained only a few weeks, passing then to their homes, where they are periodically visited. At Manchester, the Town Council not only pays for beds at the Delamere and Bowden Sanatoria, but has for several years opened special phthisis wards at its Clayton Vale Hospital.